Loyal

Heathered Pearls

Loyal - Fairly Good, Based on 4 Critics

Consequence of Sound - 72Based on rating B

72

Nestled under textured loops, there’s a sense of doom tethered to the dripping drones underlying Jakub Alexander’s ambient project, Heathered Pearls. The Polish-born Brooklyn transplant stitches a flecked tapestry of sounds with Loyal, steeped with intricacies and a restless fury underneath the surface. An aesthetic and sonic unity dominates Loyal, from the cover art depicting Alexander’s own mother and aunt to the waves of ambience in all its forms, oscillating from distant white noise to pleasantly present in a seamless matter of seconds.

Jakub Alexander does a lot of different things, which is probably why he's so stressed out. He founded "electronically made music" label Moodgadget, performs A&R for Ghostly International, curates the music selection on graphic artist Scott Hansen's (a.k.a. Tycho) art and lifestyle blog ISO50, and records and performs as a DJ and musician under his own name and several others.

Ambient music must be "as ignorable as it is interesting." That's a paradoxical statement, for sure, but there's truth in Brian Eno's words, which appear in the liner notes of his seminal album Ambient 1: Music For Airports. Thirty-four years later, the manifesto rings true for Heathered Pearls, whose latest album is a nine-song collage of hypnotic and experimental sounds. The Polish-born, Brooklyn-based DJ, born Jakub Alexander, makes music that's as likely to induce sleep as a mild panic attack.

Jakub Alexander is a Polish-born, Brooklyn-based producer who also performs as Heathered Pearls. Loyal is the ambient-electro music project’s debut album on Ghostly International, and its sounds coincidentally match Alexander’s Twitter bio: “Circular repetition at low levels.” On this album, Alexander took inspiration from the ocean, its great mass and even the overwhelming thought of disaster that may occur at sea, and translated these fears and wonders into something beautiful.The beginning of the album possesses a handful of short tracks that serve as one large intro. With the thought that the entire album has oceanic inspirations, it’s almost as if the first few tracks are setting you to sea.